A Whistling Girl

By Nola Schiff

It's the 1950s, and in Southern Rhodesia, rebellious Nick grows up against the backdrop of a rapidly-changing world––the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II, Dwight Eisenhower's presidential bid in the U.S., and the end of the Korean War. And while these events will go on to shape the history of the mid-20th century, closer to home, Nick must deal with the pains of growing up, family relationships, and biases of race, gender, and sexual preference.

It all begins when Nick secretly watches a bicycle thief flogged at the local Police Station. The thief catches sight of her and Nick senses he has put a curse on her. She buries some teeth at the base of the Hissing Tree to grow a warrior for protection. When she witnesses the gauzy spectre unfurl, she's convinced the warrior has come to help. But the ghostly fighter has a big job on its hands . . .
As a member of the Black Mamba gang, Nick is at odds with its leader, Jannie, whose jealousy of her culminates in a "test of courage" to take place the following night in the cemetery.
The night before the test, Nick listens to the BBC World Service on the radio: the journalist Sarah Bridgeworthy has gone missing en route to cover the Mau Mau in Kenya. Nick determines to find out what happened to her. . .

What follows is a twisting path of superstition, mystery, danger and even death as Nick comes to terms with her family, herself and the world around her. This intense, exuberant story with stay with readers long after the final page is turned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781543999372

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Copyright © 2019 by Nola G. Schiff

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed

or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Nola G. Schiff / 1206 Wedgewood Drive

Winston Salem, NC / 27103

Http://www.nickdoughty.com

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination.

Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes.

Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead,

or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

A Whistling Girl / Nola G. Schiff. – 2nd ed. (revised 2019)

1st ed. 2013 / entitled The Hissing Tree (Create Space)

ISBN:1463727976

ISBN13:9781463727970

‘The Mikado’ Light Opera by W.S. Gilbert / Arthur Sullivan 1885. © Public Domain USA (1961)

‘Roll Me Over in the Clover’ author unknown, possibly traditional – popular in 1944 WWII. © Public Domain USA

‘Morning has Broken’ lyrics by Eleanor Farjeon (1931) from traditional Gaelic melody (unknown author /1800s)

‘There is a Green Hill’ Author: Cecil F. Alexander (1848). Music‎: ‎George Coles Stebbins (1846-1945 © Public Domain

‘I’ll be a Sunbeam’ Hymn composed by Nellie Talbot; music composed in 1900 by Edwin O. Excell. © Public Domain USA

‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ folk song recorded by Harry Mclintock in 1928. Public Domain USA

‘Rhymes of a Red Cross Man’ Robert W. Service. Published by William Briggs (1916). © Public Domain USA

For C. K.

Table of Contents

PART I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART II

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

PART III

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

PART IV

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

GLOSSARY

Contributors / Acknowledgements

PART I

…At five o’clock, the afternoon changes gear and cools down. It goes from hot to warm, the light turns golden, stains the grass and thorn bush of the surrounding veld, and sets the western windows of the neighbourhood houses afire. The scent of lemons wafts out of the gardens to mingle with the last of the heat that hangs over the town, and from roadside thicket, Heuglin’s robins sing out their dusky chidings, ‘don’t-you-do-it, don’t-you-do-it, tirrootirree-tirrootirree.’

The workers’ compound behind Platt’s Steam Laundry becomes noisy with the chatter of women lighting fires for the evening meal. The men wait close by; they chaff and gossip, smoking Tom Tom cigarettes. Imagine this scene unfolding across the bush in every part of Africa: inside the thorny enclosures of the kraals and villages, the smallest children whine and tug at the skirts of the women. Their older siblings hurry the goats and cows home, prodding them with sticks, pelting them with stones.

Throughout the sprawling, dusty continent the children’s voices float into the ether like a disembodied eerie tinkling; they sing goodbyes to each other with promises to meet next day: ‘Lala kuhle, kuhlewile – sleep well, it is dark. Just now, now, now, I’ll see you, just now.’ – which means ‘I’ll see you in the very next moment’ – as though tomorrow were already present and the darkness between dusk and dawn were safe, bore them no grudge and held no uncertainty, no unexpected danger.

●      CHAPTER 1      ●

I tried never to miss a flogging, but this one would be my last. And it wasn’t because I was a stupid, bloody girl. I wasn’t stupid.

I had seen floggings before. You had to, to join our gang. The first time I saw a constable whip a young coloured man. I remember how the man didn’t cry––just a sharp aghh and a gulp of air – the pale brown flesh on his back sprouted red criss-crosses and the blood spread stripe to stripe. After the beating, when he lurched about, his khakis had a big wet patch across the front.

Today was Saturday. I lay sprawled across my bed on the veranda, half dozing. The book I had been reading, Allan Quartermain, had slipped from my hand when I heard the whacking, mixed in with the shrieks of battle: Umslopogaas, the strongest warrior in all Zululand, whirled his bloody long-handled axe above his noble head and struck down several of his enemies before he began to dissolve into mist.

Whack––it drifted along the edges of the vanishing Umslopogaas, drawn-out, fading…

I opened my eyes. Sunlight flickered through the green gauze of the veranda.

Whack. Again. Hell’s bells!

Fuzz! I jumped up, snatched the pillow off my brother’s sleeping head and jolted his skinny frame into life.

Whack.

Move. They’re beating someone. I bounced him again, started to count.

What? Who? I don’t want to.

Fuzz, move! Hopped him across the red cement floor of the verandah to the back of our house. The whiner. Get your shorts on. I hauled him out of his bed with him still bleary-eyed.

But Nick, where? Stop pushing!

Shhh.

I squeezed his shoulders to gag him as we sneaked by the kitchen where Amos yawned and clunked the breakfast pots on the grumbling AGA. We sidled through the screen door into the backyard, shot left past the garage and driveway, turned right alongside the khaya, left again, out of the side gate and into the sanitary lane that separated our house from the British South African Police Station. The lane joined Marimba Road to Baden-Powell Drive. It was just a dirt track, two hundred yards long and wide enough for delivery vans and the garbage truck.

A five-foot-high rubber hedge marked our side of the lane. On the station side loomed a sixteen-foot wall, lost behind thick and twisted wisteria, wild hibiscus, and honeysuckle. The station had its own borehole, and the police watered the hedge even in the dry season when we civilians weren’t allowed to.

Whack!

Aiee! Now we heard the victim.

That’s seven.

Fuzz craned his neck, gazing up the stalk. I dunno, Nick. He was the only one in the gang who hadn’t climbed the wall. The creeper twined off into the sky like Jack’s beanstalk.

It’s a cinch I said. Just put your feet and your hands exactly where I put mine, and don’t look down. I was the oldest kid in our family. No big deal. As the older sister, all manner of guard duties got heaped on me, like taking charge of my brothers, Dougie, who was Fuzz, and Peewee Pete, who was still a baby.

Whack!

Aiee!

Eight.

Quick! Like this. One foot here…hand here.

Fuzz followed, tracking my moves. I could see his scalp through his prickle of hair, which is why I called him Fuzz. Fuzz called me Nick, short for Nicole, not because he thought of it – I told him to. I hated Nicole. Only Ma and Gran called me that. I kept climbing, steady as I could for Fuzz’s sake, took small steps, picked choice handholds for him to grab, whispering Hey, that’s good, Fuzz, jolly good, keep going. Isn’t it a cinch? I babied him all the way, getting impatient when I heard–

Whack.

Nine.

Fuzz come on. I had to haul him up the last few inches, make him work his toes deep into the creeper’s tangle so he could peek over the top of the wall and not be scared of falling.

In the courtyard below, they had an old black man bent over the wooden rail in front of the stables – it used to be a hitching post with a trough to water horses, but the trough was gone now. The man’s arms hung down, wrists handcuffed together, his fingers scrabbling at the hard clay. He was a half-starved fellow, clad only in a pair of torn pants, his spine and back ribs looked ready to split out of his skin.

Whack.

At each lash, he shifted his dusty grey feet from side to side, uttering a long moan followed by two or three sobs that caught in his throat like hiccups. As always, a black constable administered the punishment: like a cartoon cop, only his legs moving below the starched khaki shorts, stiff as a tent around his puttees – one two three four five steps––he turned, did a smart hop-skip-run-two-three-four and – whack – lashed the old man with his leather sjambok. Aiee! Nearby, another black man stooped over a bicycle, the owner, I guessed. He lifted the back wheel off the ground by the saddle, turned one of the pedals and checked the wheel spin. Then he looked up and spat out a jawful of Ndebele swearing––

A! Your mother mated with a snake. He interrupted himself to further examine his battered Raleigh – Your ancestors are monkey arses – the tyres, the wheels, the pedals – A! Umfana uhambisa okwadada! Your daughter walks like a duck. A! At each blow, he paused to clap his hands and roar approval: A! Yebo-ke! Shaye futhi. Yes! Hit him again!

I nudged Fuzz. Stolen bike, I bet. Fuzz said nothing.

The British South African Police, or B-Saps, had stations in every suburb, often in old houses same as this one on Marimba Road, which once had been a farm with stables. B-Saps seldom used horses; the constables rode pushbikes and the white officers rode motorbikes, or motorbikes with sidecars, Second World War style. They used the stables to garage their bikes, the Black Maria, and a jeep they kept for bush patrol. The rear end of the stable-now-garage housed the jail block. You could tell by the tiny barred windows and four rugged walls crowned with broken glass. The main farmhouse, a squat bungalow facing Marimba Road, served as the police chief headquarters and duty office.

Can you see blood? I had caught a gleam of something wet, but it might just have been sweat.

Fuzz shook his head. How could he? His eyes were squeezed shut. I didn’t badger him. Fuzz was not keen on gore.

Today, a white officer observed the beating. Known as Captain Rat to all the kids in the neighbourhood, Captain Rupert A. Twoomey stood on the stoep of the office, smoking a cig. He would slip his tongue out of his mouth every so often and lick his little toothbrush moustache. Like most of the cops in Southern Rhodesia, he was a pommie from England, with a fleshy face and neck burned red by the sun, a rooinek. Captain Rat and the bicycle owner enjoyed the spectacle. Me too.

When I first read The Pit and the Pendulum, I lay awake at night for hours. I was too nervous to fall asleep––lest the odour of sharp steel enter my nostrils in the darkness and the frightful crescent descend and slice through my breastbone a millimetre at a time, deeper, deeper, until the halves of me rolled away from each other on the cold veranda floor. But it didn’t stop me reading the story again and again.

Halt! Captain Rat flicked his cig into the courtyard.

At this, the constable attached the sjambok to a hook on his belt and stood to attention. Captain Rat approached the prisoner from behind; he picked out a thin red wound, spread it with two fingers as if to check how deep it was; then he wiped his fingers on the man’s trousers and walked back to his office. The constable unlocked the handcuffs and the skinny thief collapsed on the pile of rags that was his old jersey. He remained on his knees as he put it on, slow as can be, easing it over his trembling, hurt shoulders. Then – he raised his head and looked at me – right through the cover of green leaves and orange trumpets – as if he knew I was there, as if he recognized me!

Staring back at him, I grew dizzy. He was old, face all cheekbone and socket, white speckles in his frizzy hair, his chest sunken. My ears filled with noise like the sound of the sea; I became so dizzy that I had to grip the creeper tight to stop myself falling. I took a deep breath, and before I closed my eyes, I saw the old man snatch up Captain Rat’s dog-end and take a puff. It all happened in slow motion, and a peculiar sensation overcame me – I felt I was growing smaller and smaller until I was a minuscule berry high on a bush, yet I was inside this berry, too – and so was the entire universe, with galaxies, stars and suns whirling about. How could something as small as a berry hold all that? My head was bursting.

Let’s go, Nick, let’s go. Fuzz tugged at my shirt, and I opened my eyes. The courtyard was empty. The old man had vanished, so had the constable, the bicycle and its owner. The sun glinted in the ugly spikes of glass on the prison walls––and a fright came over me, as if something truly, truly bad was going to happen.

Mis’ Nicky, Mas’ Douglas, buya lapha! You must come now to breakfast. Beauty was calling us from the lane below.

I gulped down a couple more breaths. You know, Fuzz, I said, as we lowered ourselves to the ground. That wasn’t a real sjambok. The real ones have little bits of stone and glass in them to really hurt a person. I wanted Fuzz to think it wasn’t such a bad thing we had just seen – that it could have been worse – but the feeling that something evil was coming made me feel like one big liar. Fuzz didn’t hear me. He was gabbing on about why do you have to beat someone for just taking a bicycle and what if the old man had just borrowed it?

It’s not fair, Nick. I don’t think it’s fair. He started to blub. By this time, old Beauty had fallen upon us, her ample, nanny shape almost busting out of the blue-and-white pinafore dress. She weighed two hundred pounds, easy. Taking a wrist in each of her big warm hands, she dragged us to the back gate.

Beauty, we just saw an old man get beaten!

A, Mas’ Dougie, the baas must be too angry now.

Then, like always, Beauty laughed as she kicked the side gate open with one bare foot. She always laughed her head off, even at bad things. She didn’t know it, but a worse-than-bad thing had just happened. An omen had invaded me

●      CHAPTER 2      ●

It wouldn’t go away. During breakfast, it hopped onto my shoulders, an invisible, sick thing crouching there. When I tried to eat my Maltabella porridge, it dived down my throat and churned up my stomach so bad I couldn’t finish, even with extra honey. I sat at the table feeling queasy as the omen chuntered around my gut. After a while, it crept up to my ears and weighted down my head.

I felt pretty damn scared. All I could think was – it’s October. Suicide Month. The hottest, stillest month, the month before the rains; people do crazy things in October, like shoot themselves or other people. One time a man shot the big hand off the City Hall clock with a two-two. Another man jumped into the Devil’s Cataract at Victoria Falls. You’d have to be a bit cracked to do that. That was me right now. A bit cracked.

Ma and Dad still weren’t up – not that I’d tell them about the omen. I didn’t want to scare old Fuzz, either. He had already moved on to the next thing in his life: Wonder Woman, the Amazon Princess. He read with his spoon of Rice Crispies raised and dripping, every now and then remembering to deliver it to his mouth.

A car horn parped three times. Beauty stuck her head through the kitchen door. Miss Nick, are you ready for Ugogo? Gran! I’d talk to Gran. She believed in spirits and such. She’d know what to do. I thumped Fuzz’s back and ran outside to the front gate where a rusty Ford truck waited, sacks of meal, milk crates and cartons of dry goods in the back. A boy in frayed shorts hung over the cab. I waved Hi, Esau.

Yebo. He scratched the back of his left knee with his big right toe.

I climbed inside the cab to sit between my grandparents. Hi, Pop. Hi, Gran. I kissed Gran’s feathery lip and let Pop scratch his chin across my cheek. Our granddad was called Pop. His own kids had named him that after Pop, the Gog comic strip in the newspaper, even though our Pop looked nothing like the podgy cartoon Pop. Our Pop was tall as a crag with a face bumpy from old bee stings. He kept an apiary back of Gran’s store but seldom netted up when collecting his honey.

Good morning, Nicole. Gran had her teeth clenched around a hairpin. She removed it to clip a strand of hair back in place. Gran’s freckles on her face and hands had begun to join up. The African sun was ruinous for any woman’s complexion, and hers was no exception she said. Saturday mornings, they collected me on their way back from town with the weekly staples. I helped in Gran’s shop, The Umgusa Cash Store. Gran called it a native store, because mostly blacks and coloureds bought goods there. She preferred their custom, because they always paid cash. Her handful of white customers always wanted stuff on tick – mostly women whose husbands drank up the food money. This is a cash store Gran would sigh then she’d give in anyway.

The store lay twenty miles north of the town on the Umgusa Road. Pop drove his old truck like Toad in the yellow racer. Telegraph poles blurred by too fast to count. Gran yelled at him, but Pop went deaf while driving. We got there in fifteen minutes, zoomed the last two hundred yards up the dirt track, and stopped in a cloud of red dust.

Hat, Ted! Gran said as we catapulted to the windscreen and back again. You’ll kill us all and the child too. Pop grunted and climbed out to release the tailboard.

Cantankerous old fool. Gran was a tutter, a footer, and a hatter. Tut, tut, she muttered when irritated, My Hat, if astonished by something and, My Foot, if she didn’t believe you. Hat and Foot were her version of swearing.

Three men ran up to help Esau unload the provisions. I helped Gran step down as she tutted at the dust and waved it out of her way.

Wide steps ran around the front of the store onto the stoep, and like always, right there in front of everybody, mothers nursed their babies. They didn’t care who saw them; They just unbundled the screaming child tied to their backs and pulled out a breast to feed it. When I had asked Gran if she thought it rude, she shrugged

It’s their custom. Babies have to be fed.

There was nowhere private for them to go anyhow. No public toilets around here. Still, you wouldn’t see my ma or any white woman doing it – no way. These women just laughed at me when I stared at their breasts all different, some fat and bulging, some stringy and hanging down almost to their stomachs; they were all colours, too, from yellow to brown, mauve and black, with huge teats for sucking on, darker than the rest of the breast.

Pop sank into his deck chair on the stoep to smoke his pipe and read The Rand Daily Mail like he didn’t notice the women, but he noticed all right.

Twin glass doors took Gran and me inside the store. From inside, you could see down the track to the main road through a window that was really one wall of the shop. This glass wall let in daylight and saved on electricity, a good thing, since Gran didn’t make much profit. The wall opposite had shelves stocked full to the ceiling. In front of it stretched a long counter with a flap in it.

Call me if anyone wants credit, Nicole. Gran lifted the counter flap and headed for the storeroom.

My job was to serve customers. I knew where everything was, knew how to operate the ancient cash register and knew most of the people who shopped here – poor people mostly. They formed a long queue from the counter out the door and around the stoep. They spent no more than a shilling apiece, always in small coins: ha’pennies, pennies, tickeys, sixpences, tied into a corner of a kerchief, hidden in a shoe or hatband or down the front of a blouse. A bag of mealie meal, a half a loaf of bread – few muntu could afford a whole loaf – sugar, salt, Bev coffee, Sunlight soap and cigarettes. It kept me busy. Didn’t have much time to think about the omen, but it stayed with me, hiding out at the back of my head like it thought I didn’t know it was there.

At eleven o clock, Pop came through to put the kettle on. I was serving a black girl, a bit younger than me, in a faded and torn hand-me-down dress from some European household. She pointed at the jars of lollipops, gobstoppers, loose toffees, and barley sugar. Two boys followed her, younger brothers I guessed. The older looked like a ragged puppet: his hands and head poked out of a too-small jersey, and an old safety pin held the front flies of his trousers together. The littlest, just about walking age, was stark naked, not even wearing a moochi. He grabbed at the shabby dress of his older sister and absently played with his willy which stuck out like a plump snail. The girl held up a ha-penny, enough for a milk sucker. Jeez, I thought, she has to look after her brothers too. I handed over an extra marshmallow fish and a sugar banana. She accepted with both hands, and all three of them laughed, delighted.

Quick. I shooed them out of the store before Pop came back. I watched them through the glass window, splitting the sugar banana three ways––without a squabble!

After tea, I asked Pop to mind the counter while I visited Gran in the storeroom – just five minutes, okay Pop? He mumbled and took out his tobacco pouch.

Gran sat at a table, writing the weekly figures in a ledger. She was a tiny person with glasses that made her eyes huge and jellified when she looked at you. Towering above her were shelves crammed with packets of flour, sugar and dried beans, Tiger Oats, Nestle condensed milk and HP sauce. A rectangular notice board with hooks and dangling keys hung on the wall near the light switch, labels under each key: lav, front gate, storeroom spares, servants’ quarters, back door.

Gran, can I ask you something? The jelly eyes wobbled at me for a couple of seconds. She put her pen down and took off her glasses. Her real eyes fixed on me, the palest blue you would ever see, steady as a hunter.

What is it, Nicole? 

If someone puts a hex on you, what can you do?

Hex? 

If someone puts an omen in you?

An omen in you? What on earth are you talking about? Who is this someone?

Well, I didn’t want to let on that an old bike thief had cursed me, so I tried to explain this feeling of being invaded by an omen.

It’s like a feeling of something terrible and bad coming. I didn’t ask for it to come. It just happened without warning.

Have you been listening to native talk? Beauty and Amos been filling your head with nonsense? 

No. It just happened. 

When? 

Today before breakfast. I lied a bit, told her it must have crept into me while I was sleeping, that it was travelling around my body, scaring me half to death. I said it could look out of my eyes and hear through my ears –

– Gran, I think I’m the messenger carrying a terrible secret, only I don’t know what the secret is – just that it is evil.  She watched me as I told her this, not blinking even once. Then she beckoned me with an inky finger, looked me over, felt my forehead and under my jawbone, took my pulse, and pushed up my eyelids.

Look down. 

I did. Her ledger was open on the table, two fountain pens beside it, one red, one black. The line: 1952 WE 8th October headed the left-hand column, underlined twice. Underneath it was a column of names, each beautifully written in a sloping style, every letter joined just so to the next. Gran had won prizes for her scripting when she was a student.

Hmm. She peered at the top of my head. I wonder if you could be psychic. 

She was examining my aura. For a grandma, she was kind of impressive; she had seen emanations since her childhood and had attended many a spiritualist meeting in the old days, which were really her young days in Johannesburg during the Gold Rush.

Do you think I am, Gran?

Maybe.

Ma pooh-poohed many of Gran’s stories; she didn’t want her telling me the scary stuff that had happened to her, Not fit for a child’s ears, she said. But Gran thought of me as a kindred soul and told me plenty. She had me describe again the feeling of doom. She put her hands above my head, ran them over my shoulders, down my spine, not quite touching me.

Something’s going on she said.

I knew it! Could I die?

No, silly child.

What will happen to me?

You need protection. She reached for her cloth bag with the tortoise shell handles that lay at her feet, dug inside, and brought out her old Bible. Opening it, she found a card and gave it to me, a picture of an angel leaning on a gigantic sword with a dead dragon at his feet. He’s Archangel Michael. Carry him with you at all times and keep him under your pillow at night. I felt my eyes wet up – this’d never work.

Tut tut. Gran lowered herself from her chair onto her knees. What we need is a proper ritual. Come. She had me kneel down beside her and, holding both my hands in hers, she muttered, Archangel Michael, look down upon this troubled child. Keep her safe and protect her should she ever encounter evil. Perhaps she felt me tremble again because she added, and with your mighty sword, slay her enemies without mercy. Amen. She smiled and pushed on my shoulders to raise herself off her knees. That should do it.

It wasn’t Gran’s fault that I didn’t feel better.

●      CHAPTER 3      ●

Pop dropped me off after lunch.

Nobody was home. Saturdays, Dad played tennis at the Pioneer Club, and Ma and Fuzz and Peewee must have gone into town with him. I wandered into the room I shared with my brother and stood at the window. Beyond the shady jacarandas, the sun was dancing on the rubber hedge as if nothing were amiss. Outside seemed a far-off place through the veranda gauze. My stomach still felt knotted up with fear, and my thoughts took off in a loony direction. I thought – okay, it’s Saturday. I’ll hang about the chicken run and wait for Amos to behead the Sunday bird. I’ll slide my hand into its hot, ribby cage, pull out the slippery tubes and fling them on the ground so they can tell their prophecy. The idea excited me for about ten seconds, until I figured, damn, I don’t know how to read entrails. It wasn’t in old Bulfinch’s Book of Myths. Stumped. What should I do? I didn’t mind being an omen carrier, but I hated being so scared – and of what exactly?

You need protection, Gran had said. Dead right.

I studied the picture of Archangel Michael and his oversized sword. He had flowing golden hair, red lips, large, upturned eyes. Not my idea of a fighter. I hauled out Bulfinch from the Bs and anything I could find on the myths and legends from olden times.

We kept all our things in the bedroom. I had a wardrobe, and Fuzz had his own chest of drawers that he had painted himself, the drawers blue, and the rest, egg yellow. We shared a long bookshelf just as high as the bedroom window, the top shelf cluttered with Fuzz’s nature specimens: insect cases, dried-up caterpillars, weaver nests, animal pellets, a puff adder skin and some bird feathers. I claimed the next three shelves for my book collection – in alphabetical order except for my favourites, which had a special place before the A’s: Huckleberry Finn, Kim, Stalky & Co., A Tale of Two Cities, Jock of the Bushveld and Treasure Island.

A good hour passed before I found something. Page 254, chapter 18, in Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. The story of Cadmus, King of Thebes…To found his country Cadmus had to kill a terrible dragon, which he did; whereupon Athena the goddess told him to sow the earth with the slain dragon’s teeth which he did––and a bunch of armed warriors sprang out of the furrows and fought each other to the death, all but five of them. These five became Cadmus’s helpers and protectors.

Huh. Dragon’s teeth.

Pete’s sake. I’d grow some warriors to protect me. I owned a crocodile tooth––close enough I judged. I kept it wrapped in a sock inside my knickers drawer. Uncle Ambrose from Gatooma had given it to me. I prized it above anything, even more than my sheath knife. What if I took the croc tooth - and wait! – I had five baby teeth – what if I took the croc tooth and my five pulled teeth down to Jacob’s Pool and buried them under the hissing tree? It’d be a perfect sacrifice! I felt the omen shrink a bit, like an oyster when you squeeze lemon on it.

The veld began at the bottom of Marimba Road, and the metallic screech of Christmas beetles rose up like a wall in my ears. The bush path could have blistered my bare feet, but I scarcely touched down as I ran it. Mossies trilled their little sparrow hearts out from every thorn tree. I heard the hoop-hoop-hoop of a nearby hoopoe; he stopped the second I looked his way. No sign of him, but I did detect his prey – a small black scorpion with its tail up, scuttling under a stone.

Go-way, called the grey lourie that lived in the hissing tree.

No-way. I called back.

Kids were not allowed near Jacob’s Pool, a forbidding, dark-green stretch of the Malabizi River that lay off the beaten footpath. Many supposed the pool bottomless because, it was said, people had drowned in it and their bodies had never floated up.

The hissing tree grew high up the bank